Imagine a museum housing precious artwork and artifacts. It needs robust security systems to carefully monitor guests and all activities inside its doors. Now imagine someone nefarious is outside. Then, the security cameras go dark for a few hours. Valuable items are missing, but no one can see what happened or who took them. The perfect heist.
This is not an uncommon scenario at sea. When vessels “go dark” on public tracking systems by disabling their version of the security cameras, their Automatic Identification System (AIS) devices, some regulatory bodies, enforcement agencies, and the public lose the ability to monitor their activity.
A new Oceana analysis shows that this unscrupulous behavior may be happening in our own backyard off Alaska – where some of the most lucrative American fisheries are located – along the maritime border we share with Russia in the Bering Sea. And it may be a far bigger problem than we realize.
Oceana’s analysis
Oceana analyzed the activity of Russian-flagged fishing vessels carrying AIS and operating near the Alaskan portion of the U.S. exclusive economic zones (EEZ) between January 1, 2020 and July 23, 2026 using public data from Global Fishing Watch (GFW)* – an independent nonprofit founded by Oceana in partnership with Google and SkyTruth.
During this period, Oceana found:
- Sixty-three instances of Russian fishing vessels appearing to switch their AIS devices off or back on just outside the Alaskan EEZ (i.e. in Russian waters within 20 nautical miles of the maritime border with Alaska) (Figure 1).
- Twenty of these apparent AIS gaps lasted over 24 hours, and six of those lasted over 48 hours.
- One Russian fishing vessel went dark for over 10 days (Case Study 1).
- Several examples of Russian fishing vessels operating at the very edge of the Alaskan EEZ border just before going dark (Case Studies 2 and 3).
In the absence of AIS, satellite imagery can provide some limited clues about human activity at sea. For instance, GFW uses machine-learning models to identify possible vessels in satellite images.** During the same nearly six-year time-period, these models detected 1,151 possible instances of unidentified vessels just inside the Alaskan EEZ (i.e., in U.S. waters within 20 nautical miles of the maritime border with Russia’s EEZ). However, these detections were not matched to any vessels broadcasting AIS, meaning there’s no public information about these vessels – including who they are, or what they were doing.
Valuable fisheries at stake
The Bering Sea lies between Russia to the west and Alaska to the east and is divided down the middle by a maritime border separating Russia’s and the United States’ EEZs. Fish, however, do not care about borders. Economically valuable species such as Pacific cod and Alaska pollock (also known as walleye pollock) call the Bering Sea home, and both species are known to cross the Alaskan-Russian EEZ border. To the west of the border, Russia operates its own commercial fisheries, including a significant pollock fishery that exported about 1.76 billion pounds in 2024.
Meanwhile, the fisheries on the Alaskan side are some of America’s most economically valuable. The U.S. Alaska pollock fishery landed over 3 billion pounds of pollock worth $432 million in 2024. And the Bering Sea supports many other economically important fisheries, like those for halibut, crab, and salmon – fisheries that are vulnerable to the effects of industrial trawling, which catch fish and crab as bycatch and damage seafloor habitats.
Protecting Alaskan fisheries and the marine habitats that support them requires careful monitoring of the maritime border with Russia. The U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) regularly patrols this area for foreign vessel incursions into U.S. waters. In the first five months of 2026, the USCG identified dozens of instances of Russian fishing vessels possibly entering U.S. waters. However, enforcement capacity is limited, which is why transparency at sea via freely available, detailed, and directly accessible fishery information such as fishing licenses, catch documentation, and vessel ownership is so important.
Another key element of transparency is vessel tracking through technology, such as with AIS devices that regularly broadcast a vessel’s location and identity, or Vessel Monitoring System (VMS) devices, a similar vessel tracking tool. However, VMS data is typically only shared with the government a vessel is flagged to and not made publicly available like AIS data. AIS was initially developed for safety at sea to avoid collisions, but has since grown to be an important tool that provides more eyes on what is happening at sea. However, not all vessels carry AIS, and these devices can be disabled, resulting in AIS “gaps.” While vessels may experience technical issues with their AIS or disable them for legitimate reasons, these gaps can also be a cover for illicit activity, and illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing. When vessels have AIS gaps and “go dark,” they disappear and no longer transmit who they are, where they are, or what they are doing. Transparency at sea is critical to protect America’s iconic fisheries and the communities that depend on them.
Alaskan fisheries officials have argued that Russia’s pollock fishery is held to far weaker conservation standards than the U.S. fishery. And although the U.S. has banned all imports of Russian seafood, it has still found its way into the U.S. market through loopholes, such as country-of-origin labeling laws that don’t specify the original harvesting country. Alaskan seafood also competes with Russian products on the global market. For instance, the European Union (EU) imported 710 million euros worth of Russian seafood in 2024 (roughly $768 million), with frozen cod and frozen pollock accounting for 87% of those Russian imports. In the same year, the EU imported 873 million euros worth of seafood from the U.S. (roughly $945 million).
Oceana is calling on countries to strengthen fisheries transparency by adopting stronger laws and policies, including on vessel tracking and the use of AIS, as outlined in the Global Charter for Fisheries Transparency. The U.S. government could use AIS data to help identify high-risk shipments from potential bad actors that may be engaged in IUU fishing; enhance catch documentation and seafood traceability data; and improve import audits and verification. Finally, Oceana is calling on the United States to implement full-chain traceability for seafood to close loopholes. The U.S. should also fully enforce its ban on Russian-caught seafood imports.
The more light we can shine on what happens at sea, the more we can protect our oceans and hold bad actors accountable.
Disclaimers
Global Fishing Watch (GFW), a provider of open data for use in this analysis, is an international nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing ocean governance through increased transparency of human activity at sea. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors, which are not connected with or sponsored, endorsed or granted official status by Global Fishing Watch. By creating and publicly sharing map visualizations, data and analysis tools, Global Fishing Watch aims to enable scientific research and transform the way our ocean is managed. Global Fishing Watch’s public data was used in the production of this publication.
*GFW’s prototype “AIS Off Events” dataset, which is still undergoing GFW quality assurance procedures, was used for this analysis. GFW records all AIS gap events over six hours, and then applies several filters to identify gaps they believe to be intentional AIS disabling rather than technical failure. GFW is unable to confirm whether the gap events are intentional, and recommends referencing additional sources and requesting supporting records from the vessel for comprehensive AIS gap event review. The filter criteria GFW applies for ‘likely disabling’ are: 1) the gap event must be at least 12 hours, 2) the gap must start at least 50 nautical miles (nm) from shore, 3) the gap must start in an area with a satellite reception quality greater than 10 positions per day, and 4) the vessel must have at least 14 satellite positions in the 12 hours prior to the gap.
** All references to satellite imagery vessel detections here are qualified as “possible” vessels. GFW uses a machine learning model to identify vessels from satellite imagery collected by the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2 satellites. While GFW removes many false-positive detections during post-processing, they are not completely eliminated. GFW also matches vessels detected in satellite imagery to vessels broadcasting AIS. However, this process is challenging, and an unmatched satellite detection does not necessarily represent a vessel that is not transmitting AIS.
More details on the data and these products can be found on GFW’s website.
